Elmer's Brother

I just got back from my third deployment from Iraq on Friday, and I happened to be at the dentist and saw a completely offensive ad from the idiots at MoveOn.org this morning. Anyway, it is a Bush-bashing ad that pretends to be arguing for American soldiers families as they will miss the holidays and it shows turkey and crying wives and blames Bush for it all. Here is the crucial part of the ad that I would like to bring to your attention. As they pretend to argue on my behalf, they show a group of soldiers standing around a table in the Middle East.

Here's the scene to which our friend refers:

"A hundred and fifty thousand American men and women are stuck in Iraq," according to the narration that accompanies this scene. Our friend (we've cleaned up a bit of his language for civilian consumption) continues:

These are not your normal everyday U.S. soldiers though. If you look at the frame they are actually British soldiers. One is in shorts (we don't have shorts as a normal combat uniform) and the others are all clearly wearing British pattern fatigues. So, my point is that these [turkeys] pretend to argue on my behalf and bash the president in the name of my crying wife, and they don't even know what an American soldier looks like! Anyway, it really [ticked] me off.

The only thing that would have made this more galling is if the ad had mentioned that the liberation of Iraq was "unilateral."

Mark Sappenfield, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, had an ingenious idea: Why not interview an actual serviceman who fought in Iraq? The result, datelined Brook Park, Ohio, is a groundbreaking bit of journalism:

Cpl. Stan Mayer has seen the worst of war. In the leaves of his photo album, there are casual memorials to the cost of the Iraq conflict--candid portraits of friends who never came home and graphic pictures of how insurgent bombs have shredded steel and bone.

Yet the Iraq of Corporal Mayer's memory is not solely a place of death and loss. It is also a place of hope. It is the hope of the town of Hit, which he saw transform from an insurgent stronghold to a place where kids played on Marine trucks. It is the hope of villagers who whispered where roadside bombs were hidden. But most of all, it is the hope he saw in a young Iraqi girl who loved pens and Oreo cookies.

Like many soldiers and marines returning from Iraq, Mayer looks at the bleak portrayal of the war at home with perplexity--if not annoyance. It is a perception gap that has put the military and media at odds, as troops complain that the media care only about death tolls, while the media counter that their job is to look at the broader picture, not through the soda straw of troops' individual experiences.

You've gotta love this. Looking at "the broader picture" means disparaging the "individual experiences" of those who are actually sacrificing to defeat the enemy and rebuild Iraq, and it means presenting Iraq as pretty much "solely a place of death and loss." It means, in short, following a predetermined script: Iraq as another Vietnam.

Glenn Reynolds argues that for this reason Iraq is really "a reverse Vietnam." He notes an exchange on CNN's "Reliable Sources" between host Howard Kurtz and United Press International's Pamela Hess:

Kurtz: Pam Hess, during Vietnam U.S. officials were often accused of distorting or even lying to the press to try to make it look like the war effort was going better than it was. When you were in Iraq did you feel like you were getting the straight story?

Hess: Certainly from the militarily I did. They have no interest in cooking the books, as it were, they--they understand that they were blamed for Vietnam and what happened, and they don't want that blame again.

They want people to understand the kind of enemy that they are facing and how long it's going to take. And frankly, most of them said to me, "Please go back and tell them not to pull us out because we are finally at a point where we have enough people here now on the ground between soldiers and Iraqis that we can actually start doing some good and start turning things around. And if you pull us out, we're just going to be back here three years from now."

Kurtz: More optimistic, at least than some of the journalists.

Hess: Yes.

When you think about it, the media actually have an institutional interest in seeing the good guys lose in Iraq. If America prevails after years of doom-and-gloom "reporting," a lot of journalists are going to look awfully silly.